Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure: Their Origins and Relevance in the Twentieth-Century

Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure

Their Origins and Relevance in the Twentieth-Century

Robert Cherry

Foreword by Donna Schaper and Valerie Holly

Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure

Their Origins and Relevance in the Twentieth-Century

Copyright © 2018 Robert Cherry. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface and Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: The Religious Setting

Chapter 2: Jewish Beliefs before the Common Era

Chapter 3: Jewish Renewal Movements at the Beginning of the Common Era

Chapter 4: Jesus’ Ministry

Chapter 5: Paul: The Beginnings of Christian Anti-Pleasure Views

Chapter 6: The Triumph of Ascetic Values

Chapter 7: The Emergence of Rabbinic Judaism

Chapter 8: Ascetic Values Confront Roman Society

Chapter 9: Bodily Pleasures:Foundational Jewish Values

Chapter 10: Forward through the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 11: Relevance in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 12: Judeo-Christian Myth

Appendix

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren: Daniela, Gita, Jacob, Kentaro, and Kazuhiro.

Foreword

To fully gain an understanding of Jewish and Christian attitudes, both historically and currently regarding sex and intimacy, Mr. Cherry, the author of this book, takes the reader through Jewish and Christian theological and Christological beginnings. Readers of Mr. Cherry’s book are initially presented with an extensive and clearly researched amount of significant material that describes in detail Jewish and Christian communities from their inception. Mr. Cherry paints a vivid picture of Jewish life Before the Common Era and into the first four centuries of the Common Era. In addition, this author’s use of the biblical texts, both Old Testament and New Testament, substantiates his assertions specifically the impact of religion and spirituality regarding sexual pleasure. Mr. Cherry‘s book includes plenty of background concerning Jesus and Jesus’ ministry. Thus readers are able to gain valuable knowledge of the cultural and social dynamics impacting the first four centuries in the Common Era.

After Mr. Cherry presents the intensive historical and biblical overview of the Jewish and Christian communities for his readers, he next details Jewish and Christian views regarding intimacy and sexual gratification. The author provides documented historical data that reveals how both of these religious communities developed and changed their attitudes and spiritual positions towards sexual intimacy. At different stages, these religious communities were not opposed to women and men engaging in sex for pleasurable purposes as well as for purposes of procreation. Mr. Cherry discloses the variables that affected .the changing views. Specifically, he details the impact ascetic religious beliefs had on Jewish and Christian views regarding sexual intimacy.

Finally, Mr. Cherry informs his readers on the unique and specific ways Judaism differed from Christianity in its historical and evolving attitudes on bodily pleasures. He identifies aspects of the biblical texts, religious beliefs from the founding Christian fathers, and spiritual interpretations from other theologians to ascertain the reasons for these changing views.

Mr. Cherry concludes his book with an overview on nineteenth and early twentieth century attitudes regarding sexual intimacy within the Jewish and Christian communities: he examines their similarities and their differences.

Reading Mr. Cherry’s book will expose the reader to extensive biblical, cultural, and historical material that informs the reader of the Jewish and Christian beliefs and attitudes regarding bodily pleasures.

Donna Schaper, Senior Minister Judson Memorial Church

Rev. Dr. Valerie Holly, Prison Chaplin and Senior Community Minister Judson Memorial Church

Preface and Acknowledgments

The core of this book is about the history of Judaism and Christianity during the first four centuries of the Common Era, with a special emphasis on how each religion’s views on bodily pleasures evolved. The two religions started off with very similar views, but as we shall see, by the end of the time period, they were dramatically different.

One can surely ask how I became interested in this topic. I am an economist, specializing in the study of US poverty and economic discrimination. I am a secular Jew, who before six years ago had little interest in religious history. However, before explaining the journey that led me to this project, let me explain what sustained my efforts sufficiently to write this book.

As I began researching the topic, the first thing that struck me was the skills religious historians possess. I entered a world in which erudite scholars, fluent in many dead languages, had scoured the archives to find shreds of evidence of this ancient world. Piecing together these fragments, they built narratives for first-century Jewish renewal movements. I was overwhelmed by the seminal work of Peter Brown, The Body & Society. Indeed, chapter 8 is substantially a condensation and paraphrasing of his work.

It also became clear that this religious scholarship had to make sense of a puzzle of small bits of information when all of the pieces aren’t available. The resulting speculation that is inherent in this detective work is often not done by disinterested investigators. Many have religious or political motivations that shape the narratives they present. As an academic, I was fascinated by the nature of the intellectual inquiry and ferreting out fact from fantasy.

I was also struck by the ongoing tension within Judaism and Catholicism between concerns for social justice and the drive for religious piety. The ebbs and flows of the priority given to one or the other is a lasting story that is still relevant.

By far the most important motivation, however, was to gain an understanding of how these two religions flourished after experiencing near extinction. Jesus was crucified around 32 CE. Within twenty years, his ministry was failing. The Galilean peasantry among whom he had proselytized had turned their backs. There were no Christian communities in the land of Israel save for that of his original apostles now residing in Jerusalem.

Another twenty years later, an unsuccessful revolt against Roman rule was launched and its defeat led to the destruction of the center of Jewish religious life, the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Now Jews had neither their political sovereignty nor a religious infrastructure. Without kings or temple priests, it was unclear how Judaism could survive.

I marveled at how these two religions were reborn because of revolutionary transformations engineered by true visionaries. Paul re-centered Christianity toward Christ’s saving grace away from the moral sayings of the living Jesus; from a Jewish sect attempting to focus on the Israel countryside into an all-inclusive religion, devoid of Jewish requirements, that recruited Gentile converts throughout the Mediterranean basin.

No less revolutionary were the efforts of the remnants of the first-century Jewish renewal movement, the Pharisees. Escaping Jerusalem during the revolt, they set up a religious academy distant from Jewish life to develop practices that would transform Judaism. Over the next centuries, these rabbinic sages were able to move Judaism toward religious study in local academies, replacing sacrificial offerings and holiday pilgrimages to the Jerusalem Temple.

Finally, I found it compelling to learn about the process by which each navigated through uncertain waters. Paul and the evangelists had an apocalyptic vision. However, once it became clear that the end-time was not near, Christianity had to begin making decisions concerning organizational structure and texts. Similarly, the rabbinic sages had to create new texts and respond to the increasing Hellenist imprint of Roman rule. Moreover, since Judaism and Christianity did not hold state power, competing views could be sustained and how leaders were able to gain consensus on important religious principles is itself a remarkable story.

Now that I have explained what energized my efforts that culminated in this book, let me describe the journey that led me to this enterprise. More than ten years ago, my reading of Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood set in motion this current project. Exquisitely written, the book sets out to document how the Jewish movie moguls overcame the Edison-led Protestant monopoly of the silent film industry. Gabler’s portrait of these larger-than-life figures emphasized their ingenuity and their marketing and management skills, but did not consider the possibility that the content of their films had anything to do with their success.

The early Protestant moviemakers were intent on Americanizing the unwashed immigrants to Victorian values. A similar group of Progressives, led by Edward Franklin Albee and Benjamin Keith, had the same goal for their big-time vaudeville circuit which dominated the industry. Gabler totally ignored how the movie moguls, as well as Jewish vaudevillians, might have been successful because they effectively countered the Victorianism that dominated popular culture. Jewish entrepreneurs emphasized the pursuit of personal pleasures and presented a positive view of modern women and female sexuality.

I looked further into the religious culture of Eastern European Jewry and found that the eighteenth-century Hasidic movement reasserted joyfulness in Jewish lives. It not only expanded the role of music but also reestablished the positive role of bodily pleasures, including sexual relations. Together with the Enlightenment, it created the anti-Victorian attitudes that Jewish immigrants brought to America.

As I pursued my research, I realized that part of the story must be the ebb and flow of Irish American involvement in popular culture. After all, in the 1880s, Irish Americans were the most prominent group in vaudeville and one would have expected that to continue. Strikingly, however, their role declined substantially while the Jewish role ascended.

It became clear that the evolution of Irish Catholicism held the answer. The Irish immigrants who came to the US during the Great Famine were individuals who had little religious training. Successful vaudeville performers came from this cohort. After the Famine, there was a religious revival in Ireland that harkened back to Augustinian notions of human sinfulness and the resulting devotional movement deplored personal indulgences. Irish-trained priests and nuns brought these anti-pleasure views to America. As a result, succeeding generations of Irish Americans increasingly frowned on commercial vaudeville, making it difficult to continue to participate in the industry.

When I published an article, Jewish Displacement of Irish Americans in Vaudeville: The Role of Religious and Cultural Values, in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture in 2013, one reviewer thought I should include more material on the religious roots of contrasting beliefs on bodily pleasures. I had read a bit on the views of the rabbinic sages and Church Fathers at the beginning of the Common Era on bodily pleasures. This suggestion, however, led me to look further into the evolution of early Jewish and Christian thought that became the subject of this book. Thus, my interest in the origins of religious differences derived from a desire to better understand the contrasting patterns of Irish American and Jewish immigrant involvement in early twentieth-century popular culture. It was further stimulated by the recent renewed promotion of the notion of a unified Judeo-Christian tradition. These contemporary issues will be discussed in the closing chapters.

I make no claims for original research. My strength, if I have one, is to synthesize published works in interesting and sometimes insightful ways. One example is my 2017 Contemporary Jewry article, Jesus and the Baal Shem Tov: Similar Roles but Different Outcomes. Hopefully, you will agree after reading this book.

As should be obvious, my initial ignorance of the scholarly literature on the variety of religious topics this book covers required me to seek out experts who generously gave of their time to help guide me along. I gained an understanding of nineteenth century Catholic revivalism in Ireland through the suggestions made by Mary Daly, Maria Luddy, Joseph Lee, and Kevin O’Neill. My interactions with Moishe Rosman, Ada Rapoport-Albert, and David Berger enriched my understanding of the dynamics within the first century of the modern Hasidic movement. Without the guidance of my colleagues Brian Sowers and Lauren Mancia my understanding of the evolution of Christianity would have suffered greatly. My knowledge concerning the origins and evolution of rabbinic Judaism can be attributed in no small measure to my interactions with Syd Leiman, Daniel Boyarin, and Rabbi Reuven Boshnack.

Finally, this book is meant for a general audience not those in religious studies so its readability is just as important as its scholarship. For someone who has been an academic writer for his entire professional career, this was a daunting task. To the degree that I have been successful transformed my writing style, I have to thank those who had the thankless task of providing editorial guidance. These includes some friends like Anita Podrid, Marilyn Horan, Noson Yanofsky and Paul Moses, but most importantly Arthur Goldwag and Ruth Mullen, professional editors who did the best they could to put clarity and energy into my writing. And, of course, I must thank the staff at Wipf & Stock, headed by Matthew Wimer, who masterfully transformed the manuscript into the book you are reading.

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The Religious Setting

Increasingly, Republican politicians point to the Judeo-Christian tradition to rally the nation to their view of America’s uniqueness. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney credited America’s world stature to our Judeo-Christian tradition, with its vision of the goodness and possibilities of every life.¹ This association only grew with the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump presidency. Not surprisingly, candidate Ted Cruz claimed his policy proposals were based on Judeo-Christian traditions but so did the more moderate John Kasich. In a 2015 speech to the National Press Club, he said,

US public diplomacy and international broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents’ propaganda and disinformation. I will consolidate them in a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo Christian Western values and ideals that we and our friends and allies share: the values of human rights, the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association.²

In his July 2017 speech in Poland, President Trump spoke more generally about defending Western values but his then chief political advisor, Steve Bannon, has often explicitly stated that its source are Judeo-Christian values.³ By tracing the evolution of foundational Christian and Jewish beliefs, this book forceful questions the very notion of a unifying Judeo-Christian tradition.

There are certainly many similarities between the foundational tenets of Judaism and Christianity but the attitude towards bodily pleasures is not one of them. At the end of the fourth century, the Babylonian Talmud completed the religious transformation into rabbinic Judaism. It firmly rejected ascetic behavior, presenting a positive view of festive activities and female sexuality. At the same time, Augustine was finalizing the foundational doctrines of Christianity. He labeled the Jews carnal Israelites because Augustine believed that Jews were of the flesh rather than of the spirit; they satisfied bodily pleasures at the expense of enhancing the spirituality of their souls.

Both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity evolved through their understanding of the history and traditions of biblical Israel. From the Dead Sea through the Sea of Galilee, an Israelite kingdom was carved out a millennium before the Common Era. This backwater fiefdom was of little consequence to the various empire builders that contested for domination in the greater region. As a result, for most of the following centuries, except for the sixty-year Babylonian captivity, Israelites were able to select their own Jewish rulers complemented by religious leaders in charge of their Great Temple in Jerusalem.

The situation changed substantially with the Roman conquest of Judea in 63 BCE, ending Jewish rule. Now an administrator selected by Rome governed. The Jewish populace first looked to the priestly class for leadership. That segment, however, lost favor when Jews witnessed its siding with the wealthy-owning class instead of impoverished farmers and tradesmen. Many looked towards Jewish renewal movements that offered alternatives to the priestly class. The two most significant were Jesus’ ministry and the Pharisees.

This book will trace the evolution of these two movements through the end of the fourth century, particularly their views on bodily pleasures. It will indicate how the eighteenth century Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe and the nineteenth century devotional movement in Ireland reestablished these contrasting bodily pleasures beliefs. The book concludes by exploring how these religious differences help explain why Jewish immigrants rather than Irish Catholics came to dominate early twentieth century popular culture and how they contrasting views bring into question contemporary notions of unifying Judeo-Christian values.

The Christian Project

Twenty years after Jesus’ death, the Christian sect was struggling. Despite the determined effort of committed evangelists who spread Jesus’ prophetic sayings, the Jewish people had turned their backs. Outside Jerusalem, there were no Christian communities in the land of Israel, not even in the Galilee, Jesus’ birthplace and where he proselytized. Christianity consisted of a small group who lived in Jerusalem and a limited number of Diaspora Jews who had been converted during their pilgrimages to the Great Temple in Jerusalem. These converts formed isolated, small communities in the Mediterranean basin, whose faith in Jesus was nourished by the evangelists who periodically visited.

This stagnating Christian movement was transformed by Paul. He diagnosed its problems and offered solutions. First, remaining a Jewish movement was a loser! Few Jews were sympathetic to Jesus’ ministry and still fewer to the message of his evangelist disciples. The Christian message must be brought to the Gentiles and this could only be successful if circumcision was abandoned, as well as the dietary requirements based upon the Mosaic laws.

Recently, Reza Aslan gained widespread visibility following the publication of his best-selling book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. For Aslan, Jesus was the Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of the messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation.⁴ This stance was changed by Paul and his allies, Aslan argues:

The task of defining Jesus’ message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’ message so as to make it more palatable. they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.⁵

The image of Jesus as a social justice warrior has inspired some Christian movements to combat the inequities brought forth by the capitalist system. In the late nineteenth century, Protestants in the Midwest formed the Social Gospel movement to defend farmers against the avaricious behavior of bankers and grain traders. A century later, South American Catholics espoused liberation theology in support of land-less peasants. In the 1980s, Jesus’ condemnation of economic inequality led the US Council of Catholic Bishops to call for strong redistributionist policies, and this perspective continues to resonate in the pages of the Catholic journal Commonweal.

While religious scholars do not doubt the authenticity of Jesus’ social justice sayings, few consider him a revolutionary who sought redistribution. For Jesus, it would be God that punished the uncaring members of the wealth-owning class, and the punishment would be their inability to enter the gates of heaven: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25, Matt 19:24). Moreover, there is no evidence that Jesus’ ministry focused on freeing Jews from Roman oppression. The Romans executed a number of leaders in the Jewish renewal movement who, like Jesus, did not confront Roman rule. For example, John the Baptist urged Jews to go into the wilderness to lead ascetic lives in preparation for the end-time; and yet the Romans executed him.

To the extent that Jesus had revolutionary zeal, it was to challenge the priestly class who controlled the Second Temple. We are told in the Gospels that Jesus entered the Temple and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves (Matt 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-19). This action has nothing to do with Roman rule but with Jesus’ belief that the priestly class was polluting the Temple.

The revolutionary nature of his actions, however, is undercut by a number of factors. While Jesus is crucified, no other member of his ministry is harmed. This suggests that rather than organizing a collective revolt, Jesus alone engaged in a symbolic action that was a nuisance to the priestly class and its Roman overlords. Indeed, in a scathing Washington Post review of Zealot, Stephen Prothero rejects Aslan’s claim that Jesus was a ‘revolutionary zealot who walked across the Galilee gathering an army of disciples’ to rain ‘God’s wrath . . . down upon the rich, the strong, and the powerful.’ Prothero points out:

What about the obvious problems with the argument that Jesus was not just a political revolutionary—as biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan and others have argued—but a violent one? What are we to make of Jesus’ apparent lack of interest in doing anything practical whatsoever to prepare for holy war? If he has come to fight for "a real kingdom, with an actual king," where are his soldiers and their weapons? And why no battle plan? The short answer to these questions is that Aslan is more a storyteller here than a historian.⁶

Aslan also undermines his claims when he discusses the situation of the Jerusalem Christian community, which he believes faithfully followed Jesus’ ministry. Yes, there were persecutions, notably the murder of the evangelist Stephen three years after Jesus’ crucifixion, but Aslan notes: The Jerusalem assembly continued to thrive under the shadow of the Temple for decades after Stephen’s death. According to Aslan, its leader, Jesus’ brother James, called James the Just, was a well-respected member of the Jerusalem religious community. Some thirty years after Jesus’ crucifixion, James was executed by a renegade high priest, Ananus. In response, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, the Jewish religious community in Jerusalem rebelled. So universal was the condemnation of James’s execution, the installed but yet-to-arrive Roman governor, Albinus, wrote a seething letter to Ananus, threatening to take murderous vengeance upon him the moment he arrived.⁷ This is hardly the experience one would expect of a revolutionary movement dedicated to the overthrow of the religious order and Roman rule.

What is most remarkable is that Aslan ignores what was Jesus’ truly revolutionary activity: bringing the good news to the destitute and despised. Like Jesus’ ministry, virtually all of the other renewal movements believed the land of Israel was entering a messianic period. They all referenced the imagery in Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good news unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. (Isa

61

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Jesus’ ministry, however, was unique. Other renewal movements stressed that only a select few would receive the messianic banquet. For some, it required scrupulously following the Mosaic laws while, for others, it required living in isolated ascetic communities.

By contrast, Jesus opened the doors to all. In particular, he desired to rehabilitate the image of the Galilean peasantry, the ammei ha’aretz. They were denigrated by the Pharisees and other renewal movements for not observing the Mosaic laws of purity. The Gospels note that Jesus sat with tax collectors and sinners, and sought companionship with the wicked sinner Mary Magdalene. If Jesus believed that these despised individuals had a place at the messianic banquet, then surely the ammei ha’aretz would.

Paul certainly differed with the Jerusalem leaders on the role of the Mosaic laws. However, he amplified Jesus’ core thesis: God’s grace is open to all who embrace Christ. Aslan also wrongly claims that Paul abandoned social justice concerns. Like Jesus, Paul rejected struggling for redistributive policies to reduce economic inequities. However, Paul did not abandon